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Highest Degree

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I combine my fundamental psychology training with my applied field experience to identify and untangle social and cultural factors affecting teamwork and creativity, particularly in multidisciplinary and/or multicultural teams. As of May 2013, I am an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, studying culture, teamwork, and creativity, among other topics. I have developed expertise in several areas, including the social psychology of team creativity, knowledge diversity in teams, and cross-cultural psychology. My research on teams has been applied to science, engineering, and aerospace domains. I have collected and/or analyzed survey, experimental, interview, archival, and audio-video observational data, using a variety of statistical and methodological techniques.

I completed both the Psychology major and the Science in Society program at Wesleyan University (1994, Phi Beta Kappa), receiving High Honors on my thesis examining student attrition from science and mathematics majors. After college, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. William McAuliffe at the National Technical Center for Substance Abuse Needs Assessment (now called the North Charles Foundation) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I earned my M.A. (December 1999) and Ph.D. (December 2003) in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. I studied social and personality effects on group creativity with Dr. Maslach and co-authored a paper with Dr. MacCoun on bias in the interpretation of scientific evidence. My dissertation, which was funded by an NSF East Asia fellowship, a Northern California Phi Beta Kappa scholarship, and a Sigma Xi grant-in-aid, assessed lay theories of creativity using original survey data from Japan, China, and the United States. With Dr. Peng, my former dissertation adviser, I continue to examine the effects of culture on creativity.

From March 2004-August 2008, I was a civil servant Research Psychologist at NASA Ames Research Center. There, I researched team composition and cohesion, organizational risk factors, individual and team selection, and aviation decision-making. I worked in the Distributed Team Decision Making laboratory and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) laboratory, collaborating with Drs. Judith Orasanu, Christopher Bearman (now at Central Queensland University), Alonso Vera, Irene Tollinger, Yuri Tada, and others. My work in the HCI laboratory earned me Ames Spotlight Awards; the HCI lab's work on improving problem reporting software and processes resulted in the whole team receiving Group Achievement Awards from Johnson Space Center and Ames Research Center.

From 2008-2011 I was a postdoc, and then from 2011-2013 I was a principal investigator and research associate at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant via the Science of Science Innovation and Policy Program. I continue to collaborate with Drs. Christian Schunn and Joel Chan (now a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University) from there. I also learned from and collaborated with Kevin Kim in the education department, who is now deceased. With these colleagues, I code and statistically analyze conversations to examine the interplay of social and cognitive micro-events. With Chunchi Lin at the National Taiwan University and Ella Miron-Spektor at Technion University (Israel), I am developing and testing a model of conflict and cognition in multinational groups.

Now at the University of Maryland, I continue my former collaborations and also work on a range of government-sponsored projects touching on the social psychology of teamwork, persuasion, and shared meaning; cross-cultural psychology topics; and others.

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Primary Interests:

Applied Social Psychology

Communication, Language

Culture and Ethnicity

Group Processes

Interpersonal Processes

Judgment and Decision Making

Organizational Behavior

Research Methods, Assessment

Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

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